Over 250,000 Small Businesses Are Targets of Fraud: Picking up the $3.1 Billion Pieces

San Francisco, CA, May 3, 2016: Motivated by opportunity and greed, fraudsters have found ripe targets in small businesses (those with less than $10 million in revenue). In 2015, fraudsters were successful in developing new approaches designed specifically for compromising small businesses’ financial accounts. Today, JAVELIN released, 2016 Small Business Fraud Report: Small Businesses are Big Targets for Fraudsters, which assesses the prevalence of back-office fraud at small business, evaluates factors driving business vulnerability, and presents strategies to prevent and mitigate fraud.

Small businesses were fraud victims and had an average of $12,139 stolen in back office fraud in 2015. Back office fraud consists of any unauthorized payment made against a business account, such as misuse of credit and debit cards, payroll systems, or ACH and wire transfers.

Small businesses are slow to adopt anti-fraud tools, indicating that either the tools are not available from their bank or the businesses are not aware of the value of these tools. In fact, only 1 in 4 small businesses use alerts, one of the most fundamental fraud prevention solutions. Other fraud safeguards have much lower adoption among small businesses.

“While small and micro-businesses are not known for their stellar security posture, there are new and exciting tools available to help in the detection of fraud and assist in better authentication, prevention." said Al Pascual, Research Director and Head of Fraud & Security, JAVELIN. “Banks are beginning to provide biometric and behaviometric technologies (a breed of behavior analytics solutions) to their business customers. There is still the hurdle of educating the market before adoption will be seen.”